When a potential customer is actively looking for your product and/or services, it’s time to crank up the inbound marketing strategies to steer the prospect in your direction. While engaged in a program, keep a few tips in mind to improve current and future campaigns.

Start SMART. In other words, plan your program with SMART goals in mind: Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Realistic and Time-based. Identifying the key metrics based on your goal is important. What part of the buying cycle is the program designed to grow? Leads to conversion? Leads to opportunities? Knowing where you are going, and when you’ll know you have arrived is the only way to know how well you are progressing, and how effective the program is executing.

Along those lines, focus your KPI’s. By keeping your eyes on specific areas of the funnel will give you better insight on performance. Set aside periods of time to review each appropriate section of the funnel in the cycle of the program. When the program is supposed to be converting leads, is that happening in the funnel? Focusing on those KPI’s during their expected phase will indicate success, or the need to rethink the campaign for the next time.

Which leads us to the following: backlog your ideas during the current program. We have all had moments in the middle of a campaign when an idea of how we might have done something differently will surface. Stick to the plan and keep a backlog list of those ideas for the next time. Don’t risk your program coming to a screeching halt by deciding to alter course because it isn’t going as well as expected. That is what the next campaign will help you fix. Let it ride its course so you can evaluate on a whole in the end.

 

Source: Savvy Panda